I had actually been on the hunt for director Kathryn Bigelow, who would win a breakthrough Oscar, the first for a female director, for her movie “The Hurt Locker.” I didn’t end up running into Bigelow, but I did have a pleasant talk with Ephron, who thrice had been nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplays. Ephron never won her Oscar, but there was no envy or hateration going on with her that night. She was rooting for Bigelow to bring home the statuette. “If she wins — and I hope she does — it really is about her accomplishment and not about any milestones,” Ephron told me.

Ephron, as a writer and director, helped created the modern romcom. Her comedic work had dramatic and personal roots: she wrote “Silkwood” (1983), a drama about a woman who dies after investigating alleged wrongdoing at a nuclear fuel production facility, and received an Oscar nomination. Ephron went on to write the autobiographical “Heartburn” (1986), which drew on her novel of the same name–and her failed marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein.

Ephron then got on a comedic roll with 1989′s “When Harry Met Sally.” The movie earned her another Oscar nomination, and featured the classic scene in which Sally, played by Meg Ryan, demonstrates, while in a deli, the art of faking an orgasm. A middle-aged woman nearby (played by Estelle Reiner, mother of director Rob Reiner) then tells a waiter “I’ll have what she’s having.”

After that, Ephron took her place in the director’s chair and wrote and directed the hits “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993 and her third Oscar nomination), “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) and “Julie & Julia” (2009).

She was far from the first person to helm a romantic comedy, and she certainly won’t be the last. But she did manage to find a populist style for the form that was sexy without being lewd, funny without being unrealistic, and whimsical without being wimpy. In other words, men could see her movies without their thoughts drifting to the night’s box scores.

Being a woman in the director’s chair, even in the 21st century, is still an unusual place to be. In an interview with Movieline in 2010, novelist Bret Easton Ellis, discussing the abilities of female directors, said, “for the most part I’m not totally convinced, [except for] Andrea Arnold, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola.” He then added the dagger: “I think it’s a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.”

Tonight, Ephron’s family released this statement about her passing “Nora Ephron passed away June 26, 2012 at 7:40 pm at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center surrounded by her family. The cause of death was acute myeloid leukemia. She was 71.” The statement added that donations can be made in her honor to The Public Theater and The Motion Picture and Television Fund.

At an event in 2009, Ephron was once asked to share the contents of her purse with the reasoning that it would somehow reflect on the woman herself. The contents, wrote the Journal’s Michelle Kung at the time, included a used Kleenex, a Kindle charger (but no Kindle) and several packages of Splenda in a plastic ziploc bag.

Ephron’s career was also something of a pleasant jumble–dramas, romcoms, Oscar nominations, books and an autobiographical screenplay–but she carried it around just the same, and made it work for her.

Future filmmakers, of either gender, will no doubt look upon Ephron’s movies with a mixture of joy and craving, and say to their agents, their colleagues and themselves, something very close to this: “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Take a look at the trailers for some of Ephron’s standout films. Which one is your favorite? Leave your thoughts in the comments.